Making Mischief: David Hare and the Celebrity Playwright's Political Persona

Mayer MAKING MISCHIEF: DAVID HARE AND THE CELEBRITY PLAYWRIGHT’S POLITICAL PERSONA SANDRA MAYER ABSTRACT This article examines the fashioning of the authorial persona of British playwright, screenwriter, and director David Hare through autobiographically inflected extra-theatrical interventions. Both exploratory and explanatory companion pieces that frame his artistic work, Hare’s lectures, essays, and memoir capture and stage the field migrations between art and activism that lie at the heart of his public profile as a politically engaged celebrity playwright and astute social commentator. It will be shown how Hare exploits the generic properties of non- fictional life-writing formats that raise, and ostensibly meet, audience expectations of sincerity and authenticity and therefore become ideal vehicles for Hare’s ‘autobiomyth’ of the prophetic writer-propagandist who strives to appeal to the moral conscience of his readership. Hare’s conception of the authorial persona is informed by a Romantic tradition of strong authorship that is intimately connected with truth-telling discourses and that relies on the author’s combined identities of artist and politically engaged commentator. This contribution argues that Hare’s proclivity for non-fictional life-writing formats ties in with a sense of discomfort about his position as a playwright between establishment recognition and self- declared radicalism. KEY WORDS Literary Celebrity; Theatre; Politics; Life Writing; Lecture; Memoir INTRODUCTION The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas holds one of the most extensive performing arts collections in the world, including the papers of British playwright, screenwriter, and director David Hare (b. 1947), which make up over sixty boxes of typescript drafts of his stage and screen plays, production notes, rehearsal scripts, reviews, as well as personal notes and correspondence, covering his entire career from the late 1960s. Picking their way through the mundane and everyday in this personal archive, readers will come across a letter by broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, dated 13 June 1998. Bragg’s message, scribbled on The South Bank Show letterhead, is a brisk and poignant response to Hare’s knighthood, conferred as part of the Queen’s 1998 Birthday Honours in recognition of his services to British theatre: “Dear David, Congratulations! Now where do you go? All the best, Melvyn” (Bragg 1998). For all its simplicity, Bragg’s note carries weighty implications for the authorial profile and self-conception of someone newly endowed with the official badge of establishment recognition. 38 Persona Studies 2019, vol. 5, no. 2 Hare himself is clearly at pains to make light of his honours, owed to Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government, which, in its ‘Third Way’ social democracy and shift from left to centre, eerily mirrors the playwright’s own ideological trajectory, taking him “from an alternative and Marxist-informed praxis to the mainstream of the political centre ground” (Deeney 2010, p. 429). In a note to actor Simon Callow, Hare is light-hearted: Erik Satie was being driven mad by a friend who was boasting to him about all the awards he had turned down. Satie said: “Don’t you realise the clever thing is not to turn down awards, it’s to live the kind of life where they never offer you one in the first place?” In this I have failed. (Hare 1998) What looks like self-ironic flippancy may well have been a strategy designed to pre-empt any niggling concerns about the apparent incongruousness of a relentless establishment critic turned decorated establishment figure; a disingenuous admission of defeat that resonates with Bragg’s enquiry, mirroring Hare’s often conflicted discomfort about his theatrical work and standing as a playwright. Indeed, Hare’s knighthood appears to have tapped into, and augmented, what has been identified as a troubled phase in his career, coinciding with his “great champion and power-base” Richard Eyre’s departure as artistic director of the National Theatre and his inability to complete the full-length play about Israel and Palestine he had been commissioned to write by the Royal Court Theatre’s International Department (Luckhurst 2007, p. 58). Mary Luckhurst is among the scholars who believe that Hare’s artistic crisis is firmly rooted in an anxiety about the socio-political relevance of his work in an increasingly fragmented political landscape that no longer offers ideological certainties and straightforward choices between socialism and capitalism (Luckhurst 2007, pp. 57-58). Moreover, in the light of theatrical practitioners who, from the 1990s onwards, have found innovative ways of engaging with the wider ramifications of identity politics and subscribed to a more inclusive definition of political theatre, Hare’s aesthetic impasse can be attributed to “his profound sense of unease that theatrical realism and traditional purveyors of it like himself might indeed be redundant” (Luckhurst 2007, p. 57). What at times seems close to a lapse of faith in his political theatre ultimately expresses itself in a curious vacillation between “the roles of ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’, both the ‘enemy’ and the ‘guardian’ of the dominant culture and ideology” (Deeney 2010, p. 433). When South Downs, his autobiographical play about his time as a scholarship boy at Lancing College, opened in 2012 in the London West End in a double bill with Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version of 1948, Hare came close to acknowledging a dilemma more keenly felt than he has cared to admit: T S Eliot, the most conservative of cultural critics, said that you can only add to a tradition by changing it. But at some point, you do actually fall into that tradition, don’t you? If you’re 64, as I am, you’re part of it. So you can put a play on with one of Rattigan’s and see the connection, whereas once you would have seen only the difference. (Qtd in Coveney 2012) This ambivalence about his own career trajectory, from the leftist theatrical fringe of the 1970s to his status as canonical playwright whose success has been closely linked to the established, male-dominated institutions of the theatrical mainstream and their key stakeholders,i most prominently suffuses Hare’s autobiographically inflected extra-theatrical interventions. It is through them that he stages the persona of the truth-telling political playwright and fierce social and cultural critic who appears to speak from an outsider position in response to the need to find new relevance in a swiftly transforming political and theatrical landscape with which he has increasingly felt out of joint. As genres of self-exploration and self-justification, lecture and memoir both capture, and serve as vehicles for, the fluent cross-field migrations between the 39 Mayer spheres of literature and politics that have been a vital element in the fashioning of Hare’s public profile as a celebrity playwright. This article explores the construction of Hare’s politically engaged authorial persona through the specific properties of non-fictional life-writing formats, whose ‘truth capital’ not only ties in with the truth-telling claims of his political drama but appeals to the playwright’s authorial self-conception, heavily indebted, as it is, to the Romantic tradition of the author as rebellious and enlightened poeta vates. Hare’s case demonstrates how a renewed focus on the personal and its illusion of authenticity can be employed as a strategy to address the vagaries of literary reputations over the course of a long career that spans both alternative and mainstream traditions and the need to reclaim authorial legitimacy in the fast-moving worlds of art and politics, where there is a serious threat of slipping “behind the dustcart instead of [being] in front of it” (Hare qtd in Kellaway 2018). STAGING THE PERSONA OF THE POLITICAL PLAYWRIGHT Over the course of his long career, David Hare has steadfastly cultivated and maintained a high- profile public persona as one of Britain’s leading political playwrights, screenwriters,ii and theatre and film directors, whose oeuvre also includes television plays, an opera libretto, theatrical collaborations, and stage adaptations of Brecht, Chekhov, Schnitzler, and Pirandello. Covering a range of dramatic subgenres, from well-made play, satire, and documentary and verbatim theatre to biodrama, pastiche, and what the dramatist himself identifies as ‘stage poetry’ (see Boon 2007, pp. 3-4), Hare’s plays, with few exceptions, address topical issues and bear the recognisable hallmarks of English dramatic realism: they include, for instance, the media satire Pravda (1985), his collaboration with Howard Brenton; the National Theatre trilogy Racing Demon (1990), Murmuring Judges (1991), and The Absence of War (1993), which undertakes a painstaking dissection of the Church of England, the English legal system, and the Labour Party as three quintessentially English institutions in crisis; his self-performed, semi- autobiographical stage monologue Via Dolorosa (1998), inspired by his Middle Eastern travels; the verbatim play Stuff Happens (2004) about the invasion of Iraq in 2003; The Power of Yes (2009), Hare’s meditation on the financial crisis; and, most recently, I’m Not Running (2018), in which he addresses the conflict between traditional party politics and single-issue campaigning and tackles the thorny subject of female Labour leadership. Frequently hailed, these days, by the media as “a grand old man of theatre” (Kellaway 2018), Hare started out his career in the late 1960s as part of a generation of socialist theatre practitioners operating within a network of alternative venues and touring companies. Following the West End success of his comedy Knuckle (1974), he quickly established himself as a figurehead who would lead “that generation, and its political and stylistic concerns, on to the stages of mainstream theatrical culture in the 1970s, when the epic ‘State of the Nation’ play in many ways set the agenda of theatrical innovation” (Boon 2007, p.

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